RaveThe Sunday TimesMantel is a fiercely honest writer. She confesses that she gave little thought to the prospect of bearing a child until that prospect became physically impossible ... There is no hint of the mawkish in her presentation, just a finely controlled sense of anguish and lasting loss. The pages devoted to the operation that changed Mantel’s life are among the most detailed and affecting ... Mantel deftly reimagines what it was like to be three, four and five, with all the mystifying confusions and sudden enchantments that come with early life ... To say that this book is writerly is not to criticise it, but rather to suggest that the art of writing rescued and continues to rescue Mantel from unwanted demons. She prides herself on her continued use of the semi-colon and the accuracy of her prose, and that pride is tenable.
